


Knowledge and Betrayal

by spindleofwords



Series: Your Family is the Most Important Thing, Boys [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst Dean Winchester, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-06
Updated: 2013-01-06
Packaged: 2017-11-23 22:02:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,331
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/626983
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spindleofwords/pseuds/spindleofwords
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean knows nearly everything about his brother that he needs to. Nearly. (Rated T for the language.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Knowledge and Betrayal

Dean loved with intensity. He loved with insanity and beyond reason, and he loved with everything he had, all the time, no matter what. He loves enough to not question an order, nothing big or anything small, even in urgency, even when his house is burning down around his ears and a baby is thrust into his hands.

Dean learned early on what a parent learns fairly early too; the child you raise will love you and care for you, but hell if they appreciate you the way they should, and god forbid they appreciate what you do for them. The child will come to resent you for giving orders to them like they are still young, and they will always defy your one, heart-close wish. They will betray you.

Dean knows this; he may the older brother instead of the father but he knows, he _knows_ how it feels to have Sam push him away when he’s just trying to help, he knows how it feels to have Sam disobey orders, knows how it feels to have Sam disobey _him._ Still, he loves Sam endlessly, without reason or rhyme. He has been betrayed by Sam more times than he can count and yet he still just **gives.**

Dean remembers when Sam was little and pushed away his hands at the small sneakers of the four year old and can clearly recall the small flash of hurt that he pushed down into his chest. He can remember the moments when Sammy actually did let him help, let him pick him up and fix him and put him back together or make him laugh. 

He can remember the jolt of his heart the first time Sam fixed serious eyes on him and told him, “It’s Sam,” when he called his baby brother Sammy. Dean can tell you the exact time Sammy first disobeyed him on a hunt and didn’t get almost killed, just mildly injured, can describe perfectly the look of fucking triumph as if Dean had been some bad person for trying to smother him with a damn order. He can also tell you how his fist clenched so hard he drew blood in his palm but with his other hand he clapped Sammy on the shoulder and told him, woop, hey, you’re still alive. 

It doesn’t get any better as they grow up, either; because his father is always MIA, Sammy takes out the standard teenage oppositional defiance on Dean, and that hurts too, but by now Dean’s used to it and he kind of just takes, is still hard on Sam when he needs the cracking down because dammit, Sammy was a sassy bitch even from a young age, he learned all that shit young. This was also around the time Dean started calling the bitch Samantha.

But it meant he loved him. He raged back at the teen, yelled at him, got into screaming matches, grounded him, punished him, threatened to take him over his knee like he used to when Sammy was smaller, called him names, made fun of his hair, and with every breath he took Dean meant I love you. Somehow Sam stopped listening.

Dean knew that Sam really wanted, really _needed_ to go to college. Dean knew it, and just like he knew that, he knew Sammy was going to leave him. But he didn’t know that it’d rip half of his heart out of his chest to send the brunette packing; he didn’t know that Sam would leave in a huff and be angry at him, of all people; and he didn’t know what made him stop calling his brother maybe two years in. After all, it was extremely possible to lie to himself, and so his subconscious knew that it was because of green simmering envy at the chance at normal and the blatant betrayal of Sam leaving him and having the audacity to be happy without him when he was fucking miserable there without Sammy.

  


Of course it isn’t the first betrayal; after all, Sam had pushed away Dean’s helping hands as they hovered over his shoelaces, had disobeyed his orders and authority, had betrayed his dad’s wants and you know, Dean got used to it. He learned to forgive easy because there was Sammy with his small, screwed up, wet eyes, six months old in his arms again with Dean looking down at him in the back of the Impala, giving the crying bundle his finger to suck on till they could stop and make food, and how could Dean ever be mad at that?

When Sam got possessed once and took him to town, told him about himself and shot him full of rock salt, Dean laid on the filthy floor of the stupid asylum boiler room and felt Sam’s words carve a hole in his chest because the words were right, all right, and it was a betrayal only because it was the basest secrets of Dean’s thrown out into the light. Sam apologized afterwards and Dean forgave him, but only because he knew how to build a fucking bridge, by now. When Sam chose a demon over him, Dean was hurt, oceans and continents and planets of hurt and anguished but he tried, he tried to remember Sam in his arms and Sammy being the only important thing and he forgave him for that, too. 

Sam had the worst way of betraying Dean’s feelings; Dean took great care to carefully shine up all of his stupid armor and layer it on and Sam, without even stopping for breath, would take his stupidly big hands and pry back the metal till it was bent and tarnished and reveal his open wounds to the world, then take surgical tools and stitch him up without anesthetic. It was the only way Dean would let himself be put back together but it was an invasive betrayal of his privacy every time and it was something he knew he had to be used to but couldn’t ever get the hang of.

Sam also kept secrets close to himself, not armored on his skin but plated, locked and nailed into his heart, and it was a betrayal of their mutual trust that he refused to tell Dean things, didn’t want to tell Dean what was wrong and bothering him and keeping him from being himself. The older man had tried to reach out more than normal, had offered not even a branch but an entire fucking tree and his hand and arm and shoulder to boot, but Sam had pushed him away even though it cost Dean too much to even reach a little.

But.

Sammy himself was a but, was a hesitation, was a pause and a breath and a blink, and Dean always made it, couldn’t help it, was hesitant to shoot or hurt him because, well, he was Sammy, and Dean had learned his lesson very early on, that Sammy was the most important thing, always.

Dean loved Sam. He did. Dean gave Sam everything of himself, exactly the way a parent provides and provides for their child without stopping to think about how much of themselves they’ll lose in the prospect, the way a knight gives his life for his king, the way a soldier takes a bullet for his friend wounded next to him. And sometimes, Sam betrayed that love, but it didn’t stop Dean from loving Sammy, and it didn’t make him love his brother less. Because Sam always came back with his sad eyes and sloping shoulders and broken voice and always, always, _always_ told Dean he hadn’t meant to, and if Sam couldn’t forgive himself then Dean would do it for him, lying in his motel bed in the middle of the night looking at his brother sleeping fitfully on the bed next to him. No one could argue him out of it; after all, despite the betrayals, Sam was what Dean knew best anyways.

**Author's Note:**

> This matches my piece for Sam titled Memory. If you like this one, you can check that one out too.


End file.
